Where Martyn Waites’s Newcastle overlaps with mine it’s millimetre perfect (though he does manage to avoid the term “coffin like” to describe the Crown Posada so maybe he find more millimetres in that pub than I do) and though I don’t know the bits of London that his character Stephen Larkin gets to in this book the place has the same ultra realistic feel to it. Initially I was disappointed at how fast this story sped down the southbound A1 since the setting was one of the major things I liked about the first book Mary’s Prayer but once I was into the story it really didn’t matter where it was set, only that the setting was superb.

The beginning of the book seemed a bit lacklustre, Larkin agrees to help a drunken detective friend look for his runaway daughter in London but there was little motivation for him to do so and I couldn’t really buy into what he was doing. Once the tale was flowing it poured down easily but it was let down by the poorly set up beginning.

Certainly a series I’ll be persevering with though as it’s got tons going for it, great settings, excellent characters and a good plot that I was only disappointed in for about the first 30 pages. And it looks as if the next book heads back to the north east which is always a good thing.